JAMPA DORJE (Richard Denner) is a printer, poet, yogi, and monk. Born in 1941 in Santa Clara, California, he came of age as a street poet in 1960s Berkeley. He later earned his degree from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and founded D Press and Kapala Press, small independent publishing ventures devoted to experimental literature and contemplative practice.
Dorje completed a traditional three-year solitary Tibetan Buddhist retreat at Tara Mandala in Colorado, deepening his spiritual practice and poetic vision. He now resides in Ellensburg, Washington, where his life continues to bridge the disciplines of art, dharma, and independent publishing.
Editor’s Introduction
To encounter the writing of Jampa Dorje (Richard Denner) is to step into a mind that ranges without apology from the subatomic to the sacred, from diapers to dark matter. As poet, printer, monk, and caregiver, Dorje belongs to that rare lineage of writers whose lives are inseparable from their work, and whose work gives shape to the chaos and grace of lived experience.
In Poised, Dorje throws language into the void and listens for echoes. The poem pulses with cosmological speculation, Zen logic, and a kind of raw, insistent humor that unsettles even as it dazzles. Here, Raging Bull meets Bertrand Russell, and a “vacuum soup” boils with subatomic yearning. The poem does not search for answers. It trembles in the space of unknowing and names it, almost.
Then, in The Caregiver, we are brought back to Earth, to the quiet devastations and minor redemptions of tending to an aging father. The work is diaristic but unsentimental. Episodes unfold in prose as precise as it is unadorned, tracing the slow-motion collapse of bodily independence, the surges of dementia, the moral tangle of inheritance, duty, and rage. If Poised looks outward into infinite space, The Caregiver steps inward, into a home stretched to its limits by love and exhaustion.
Together, these works form a diptych of another kind. One contemplates the origins of the universe. The other navigates the final chapters of a life. Between them is the same fierce awareness: of impermanence, of absurdity, and of the fragile, necessary rituals we make to hold it all.
